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Canadian Fintech Solutions Provider Gives Financial Institutions the Flexibility and Security to Rapidly Innovate and Compete; Advances IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI Strategy

ARMONK, N.Y., Dec. 15, 2020 — IBM today announced it has acquired Montreal-based fintech company, Expertus Technologies Inc. The acquisition strengthens IBM’s portfolio as an end-to-end digital payments solution provider and further advances IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy.

“Financial institutions must balance greater demand for secure digital solutions while complying with rapidly evolving regulation,” said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services. “Expertus’ payment-as-a-service solution expands our hybrid cloud-based payments offerings, transforming payments and treasury management with AI to give financial institutions the flexibility to rapidly innovate and stay competitive as consumer demands evolve.”

Expertus is a pioneer in cloud solutions for the financial services industry. More than 1,000 entities including banks, credit unions, regulatory agencies and corporates around the globe process an average of over $50 billion daily on its payments platform. Expertus is also one of the largest North American services bureaus of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT), the vast network used by banks and other financial institutions to manage money transfers and treasury transactions.

With this acquisition, IBM gains decades of consulting experience to address the most pressing payment modernization challenges of financial institutions, which are part of the more than $100 billion consulting and business process services opportunity in banking and financial markets¹ over the next few years. This acquisition also expands IBM’s finance industry depth and ability to manage complex integrations – of technologies, people and processes – and builds on last month’s acquisition of SAP consulting partner TruQua, which bolstered IBM Global Business Services’ cloud application modernization and finance transformation expertise.

AI-Powered Intelligent Workflows for Payments

IBM has long been committed to simplifying and streamlining the payment transaction experience while complying with the myriad of regulations, improving fraud detection and enforcement of payments industry standards. Expertus payments and cash management solutions modernize payment operations such as real-time cross-border payment processing. Cloud-based payments provide the needed flexibility for financial institutions to develop and offer new consumer services, while also meeting strict regulatory requirements for financial data transmission and fraud detection.

Together with Expertus, IBM can now provide financial institutions with the full breadth of intelligent workflows, end-to-end business processes embedded with AI, data and analytics, transforming payments and treasury management on the cloud with real-time data, easy to use interfaces and improved pricing by reducing cost per transaction. Additionally, it complements the deep industry expertise, security and resiliency available through IBM Cloud for Financial Services™.

“Expertus built an efficient and trusted financial services enterprise, that in many ways, was ahead of its time,” said Jacques Leblanc, CEO and founder of Expertus. “Together with IBM, we now can offer businesses worldwide the benefits and security of seamless end-to-end financial transactions.”

“IBM and Expertus’ long-standing partnership is a great foundation upon which to deepen our relationship,” added Leblanc. “As a home-grown Montréal company, we are proud to bring our offering as well as our commitment to customers to a new level and to a broader market.”

Expertus is now part of IBM Global Business Services, following its previous successful alliance with IBM Payments Center Canada. IBM will consolidate Expertus’ Payments Platform as a Service offering and build on SWIFT processing services and capabilities, which enable a global network of 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries to send and receive information about financial transactions.

IBM’s continued investment is its secure and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud offerings – leveraging Red Hat OpenShift – makes it uniquely equipped to meet the specific requirements of financial services institutions. IBM Cloud for Financial Services™ is powered by the same industry-leading confidential computing security found in IBM Z. Delivered via IBM Hyper Protect Services, it features ‘Keep Your Own Key’ encryption capabilities backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available, making it ideal for mission-critical workloads and highly sensitive data.

– IBM Research innovations in natural language processing, automation and building trust to be commercialized in Watson products

NEW YORK, Dec. 9, 2020 — IBM today announced innovative new capabilities planned for IBM Watson designed to help scale the use of AI by businesses.

Developed by IBM Research, the new capabilities are designed to improve the automation of AI, provide a higher degree of precision in natural language processing, and foster greater trust in outcomes derived from AI predictions. They include:

• Reading Comprehension is based on an innovative question-answering (QA) system from IBM Research. Currently in beta in IBM Watson Discovery, it is planned as a new feature that can help identify more precise answers in response to natural language queries from vast troves of complex enterprise documents. It also provides scores that indicate how confident the system is in each answer.
• FAQ Extraction uses a novel NLP technique from IBM Research to automate the extraction of Q&A pairs from FAQ documents. Currently in beta in IBM Watson Assistant’s search skill, it is planned as a new feature to help businesses keep virtual assistants up-to date with the latest answers and reduce the time-consuming process of manual updates.
• A new intent classification model is now available in IBM Watson Assistant. It is designed to more accurately understand an end-user’s goal or intent when engaging with a virtual assistant and to enable administrators to train the system faster. The model provides more accurate results from less data versus compared commercial systems¹. This can help businesses go live with virtual assistants in a few days while achieving high accuracy.
• IBM Watson Discovery now includes support for 10 new languages including Bosnian, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Serbian and Swedish. IBM has continued to add support for additional languages to help businesses build global, enterprise-grade NLP solutions.

“This past year has shown us that the real power of AI is in helping companies take action and respond to changing conditions in real time. That means in minutes and hours — not weeks or months,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. “Today’s new AI capabilities are yet another example of how cutting-edge AI advancements coming out of IBM Research help us to deliver innovations for language, automation and building trust in IBM Watson that are changing the game for businesses of all sizes and across all industries.”

Advancing AI Governance Capabilities to Help Build Trust and Transparency in Business Outcomes

IBM also announced plans to commercialize IBM Research-developed ‘AI Factsheets’ in Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data throughout the next year. Like nutrition labels for foods or information sheets for appliances, AI Factsheets are designed to provide information about a product’s important characteristics. Standardizing and publicizing this information will help build trust in AI services across the industry.

To complement this, IBM Services for AI at Scale, a new consulting offering, provides businesses with a framework, methodology, and underlying technology to guide organizations on their journey to  trustworthy and ethical AI. IBM Cloud Pak for Data also has new capabilities to provide a complete foundation for AI that can run on any cloud.

Leading global brands are using IBM Watson to infuse intelligence into their workflows. For instance, a global leader in assurance, tax, strategy and transactions and consulting services, EY is transforming the M&A due diligence process using IBM Watson Discovery. Following the expansion of its global alliance with IBM earlier this summer, EY launched Diligence Edge, which includes a custom NLP model trained on EY proprietary M&A language, to help deal makers identify and leverage valuable insights throughout the transaction’s lifecycle, as well as make informed decisions on deal value opportunities to gain an advantage in competitive deal processes.

Regions Bank has worked with IBM to complete a model monitoring use case that leverages IBM Cloud Pak for Data and Watson OpenScale. Regions was able to have a continuous read on model accuracy in production and achieved a higher confidence in the quality of predictions. IBM provides a standardized and disciplined approach to tracking model performance and will further Regions’ end-to end model lifecycle management program. The company is also using IBM Watson to enhance customer service and reports having decreased call wait times by 40 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic using Watson Assistant.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 1, 2020 — IBM Security today announced that it was recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Security Analytics Platforms, Q4 2020 report. Released today, the report evaluated 11 of the top Security Analytic providers, with IBM ranking highest in the current offering category compared to other vendors, and Forrester noting that IBM is “building an open security platform on the cloud.”

“As enterprises have moved their own workloads to the cloud to take advantage of its scale, flexibility, and availability, security vendors have finally started to follow suit with cloud-based delivery of their security analytics solutions,” said the report. According to Forrester, this shift has enabled vendors to more quickly roll out new capabilities to their customers and decrease the management overhead for these systems.

The Forrester Wave report recognizes several differentiators for IBM’s security analytic offerings, including IBM Security QRadar Advisor with Watson, IBM Security X-Force threat intelligence capabilities, and integration with IBM managed security services. Additionally, Forrester notes that customer references appreciated IBM’s global reach, technical support, and innovation.

“IBM believes the future of security will be built on open, cloud-native technologies that allow companies to simplify the complexity challenges plaguing today’s security operation centers,” said Justin Youngblood, Vice President IBM Security. “We are tackling this problem head on with IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security, which is designed to connect security and infuse AI and automation across previously siloed tools, teams, and hybrid cloud environments.”

Download the report via IBM’s registration page here, or Forrester subscribers can read the full report here. Learn more about IBM security analytic offerings, including Cloud Pak for Security, IBM Security QRadar (Security Information and Event Management) and IBM Security SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response.)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 1, 2020 — IBM Security today announced that it was recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Security Analytics Platforms, Q4 2020 report. Released today, the report evaluated 11 of the top Security Analytic providers, with IBM ranking highest in the current offering category compared to other vendors, and Forrester noting that IBM is “building an open security platform on the cloud.”

“As enterprises have moved their own workloads to the cloud to take advantage of its scale, flexibility, and availability, security vendors have finally started to follow suit with cloud-based delivery of their security analytics solutions,” said the report. According to Forrester, this shift has enabled vendors to more quickly roll out new capabilities to their customers and decrease the management overhead for these systems.

The Forrester Wave report recognizes several differentiators for IBM’s security analytic offerings, including IBM Security QRadar Advisor with Watson, IBM Security X-Force threat intelligence capabilities, and integration with IBM managed security services. Additionally, Forrester notes that customer references appreciated IBM’s global reach, technical support, and innovation.

“IBM believes the future of security will be built on open, cloud-native technologies that allow companies to simplify the complexity challenges plaguing today’s security operation centers,” said Justin Youngblood, Vice President IBM Security. “We are tackling this problem head on with IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security, which is designed to connect security and infuse AI and automation across previously siloed tools, teams, and hybrid cloud environments.”